<p>After reading several threads about colleges rejecting students with 2400/36 scores, I have decided to pose this question:</p>
<p>In your opinion, is it better to score a 2400 or a 2360?</p>
<p>I have yet to take the SAT, but I am now aiming for a 2380 at most. I understand this may sound completely ridiculous, but sometimes it isn't best to score a perfect. Okay, okay, you should obviously 'aim' for a perfect score, but I'm still hoping for 2380, not perfect. </p>
<p>What? 2400, it’s higher. Period. Sometimes people, like me, get close but miss because of careless mistakes. A 2380 looks is just one question missed, most likely from a careless mistake, and colleges will think “Ah, this kid was so close, it was just one question.” Aim for a 2400.</p>
<p>I feel like some uber elite institutions reject the 2400/36 scorer to prove a point: test scores don’t matter <em>that</em> much. Also, schools want to brag about the number of 2400’s they rejected.</p>
<p>If a 2400 is a turn off, this would be a perfect example on why not to even consider standard test, since the whole point is basically to see max of questions you can answer correctly.</p>
<p>Ok, lets be LOGICAL here. First off, if you deliberately aim for a near miss of a 2400, chances are you will score lower. Second of all, just because many of 2400s are rejected doesn’t mean that the perfect score is a turnoff. Think about it this way: even if a large percentage of 2400s are rejected, I can guarantee that a larger percentage of people scoring lower in the 2200-2300 range are also rejected.</p>
<p>Even if this were a “game” to them to see which college rejects the most 2400s, what would they gain from it? They’re supposed to be endorsing higher education.</p>
<p>Okay, I agree that you should definitely ‘aim’ for a 2400. However, when you await your scores, what would you rather get? That is the question I am raising here.</p>
<p>They don’t purposely reject perfect scorers to brag. They mention that X% of 2400’s get rejected to emphasize the fact that test scores are not the end all be all. They don’t want applicants to think, “ZOMG I got a 2350 I’m a total shoe-in.” The rejected 2400ers were likely lacking in other areas of the application.</p>
<p>Adcoms don’t look at an applicant with a 2400 and say “ZOMGZ LET’S REJECT HIM SO WE CAN SAY WE REJECTED A DUDE WITH A PERFECT SCORE!!!”</p>
<p>EDIT: I find it oddly funny that jamesford used “ZOMG” in his post and I used “ZOMGZ” in mine, unaware of his usage of the expressive acronym in a post above lol</p>
<p>Unless you’ve got a 2400 in addition to, like, a dozen tests in the 2300+ range and you’re just obsessive, I can’t imagine how it would be a turn-off. This is a little paranoid, I think.</p>
<p>I think that the only reason colleges reject applicants with perfect scores is because those apps seemingly have nothing else to offer. So a 2400 is not a bane; it’s just an added guarantee that an applicant will be able to handle the college workload provided that everything else indicates that as well. More importantly, colleges want “interesting people,” who have lives beyond their grades and who’ll add “diversity” to their campus… yes, unfortunately that same old vague stuff :).
But hey, don’t worry about it too much. Focus on other parts of your app, regardless of what your SAT scores are. I know a few people who got 2390’s, and it’s ridiculous how much they kill themselves for screwing up one Math problem. Just forget about it! A 2390 applicant isn’t necessarily smarter/ more hard-working than a 2150 applicant, believe me!</p>
<p>If it’s single-sitting, first time, then yes. If you took the test like 4+ times to get that 2400 and you’d been getting like 2390 other times, then you just look like a greedy grade grubber.</p>
<p>2400 is nice if the rest of your app isn’t robot-like</p>
<p>A girl from my school is a crazy perfectionist. She got 2400 for her sats, 800 for all of her subject tests, her highschool weighted gpa was 4.5. She was president of almost every club, and when she didn’t make it as president of MUN she started crying like hell to the director until he finally got sick of her and gave her this new made up position- training director. Oh she plays like pretty much every sport there is too.</p>
<p>She ended up getting rejected by all ivies. The best she got into was georgetown. Sucks 2 b perfect.</p>
<p>If you have a perfect 2400 and nothing else good on your app, it can look sketchy. If all you have to offer is good SATs and nothing MUCH else, and its a 2400 vs a 2380 there is no way i could EVER see the 2400 getting rejected and the 2380 getting accpeted.</p>